


And I laid traps for troubadours

by Aja



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 08:12:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9712874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: By day, Arthur and Eames are mild-mannered dreamshare criminals.By other increments of time, Eames ferries souls across the River Styx, and Arthur?Arthur is the anxiety-ridden Angel of Death.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [teacuphuman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/teacuphuman/gifts).



> Thanks to oceaxe and deinvati for the feedback and encouragement! All mistakes and badnesses are my own.
> 
> Extra-special thanks and hugs to teacuphuman for running this challenge, and for being so enthusiastic about this fic before it was even posted!

The job is an inception on a priest who probably stole his brother’s inheritance, and these are the easiest kinds of jobs because nothing but nothing is more effective at incepting someone than religious guilt. 

These are also the jobs that are the most fun for Arthur, because he gets to stare broodingly at his moleskine and then say gravely, as if he’s been puzzling it out for some time, “Eames could forge an angel to make the priest think god is sending him a messenger,” and then he gets to watch Eames grimace and shoot him angry eyerolls and increasingly exasperated protests for the rest of the job.

It’s worth it, though, for the unholy beauty and enjoyment he gets out of seeing Eames take his true shape on earth. 

Eames has to make some alterations. In the firmament, his wings are roughly the length and width of a football field, but he shrinks his whole body down to a third that size when he unfurls them in the dreamscape. 

It’s still the most stunning thing Arthur has ever seen. The first time he’d witnessed it, he’d accidentally dropped his own form and reverted to his original shape as well. Thankfully, no one else had been around at the time, and he and Eames had simply stood staring at each other, angel and demon, admiring one another’s true forms.

Occasionally, when Arthur has had an exceptionally rare amount to drink, he will try to explain to Eames that all life is like quantum states in physics: that on an individual level, people, like particles, can exist in two states of being at once.

This explains how Eames can exist simultaneously as a dreamshare mastermind who is also a petty thief and a ruffian who is never up to any good, and as an agnostic angel who thinks god is a really bad boss and is constantly protesting heaven for minimum wage increases — calls that go unheeded and increasingly send him to the pubs to trade shots with Arthur. (And later, if Arthur is lucky, other kinds of exchanges.)

And it explains how Arthur can exist simultaneously as a cantankerous Jewish nerd who is also an international criminal who invades people’s minds for a living, and also as a demon out of space and time who has spent the last six thousand millennia or so dragging his heels on earth and trading quips and barbs and occasionally sex with Eames. 

Technically, Arthur is the angel of death. He had that role before he Fell, before death had actually even existed; death had finally arrived not long after he’d left heaven, so he’d just kept the job title. Recent events in human history have meant that Arthur works late hours more and more often, and even though he can technically bend time and space, his workaholic tendencies have never been more enabled. 

It doesn’t come with a black hood or a scythe or anything fancy like that. Once, on a whim, Arthur dressed up as the mythological version of himself for Halloween, decked out in full-on skull-faced, shrouded regalia. He didn’t even win first prize in the local cosplay contest. Eames is still laughing about it.

Arthur and Eames are essentially chief bouncers for the afterlife. Arthur’s primary job is reaping souls and then doing a hand-off to Eames, whose primary job as the Ferrier across the river Styx is making sure they get sorted into heaven, hell, or purgatory. There’s enough of an overlap in their job descriptions that if they had to switch places for a day or a few centuries or so, no one would ever notice a difference. Thanks to all the years on earth, their jobs have more or less become whatever they want them to be anyway. Heaven’s benefits are notoriously shoddy compared to hell’s, while hell’s job inspections are, well, hellish; but they’ve got enough seniority that no one really fucks with either of them at this point, and they’re largely left to their own devices.

Eames and Arthur are by nature and divine will polar opposites, which means that Eames gets the wings and Arthur gets the fiery eyes and the horn/tail combo; Eames can shapeshift into whoever he wants to be, but Arthur can possess whoever he wants. Possession isn’t really the done thing anymore — hell has more or less progressed away from robbing people of free will in order to claim souls, as it makes hell look bad and tends to turn the soul a bit soggy once it finally arrives in the underworld — but it still gives Arthur a vicious personal satisfaction to know he could pull an inception entirely by himself if he had to.

The “demon” part of his identity doesn’t actually mean a whole lot in the context of the current and most likely final millennia of human existence. It will, however, mean a lot more after humanity has finally wrapped itself up, when he and Eames will be flung across time and space to their respective homes.

Arthur won’t pretend he hasn’t been thinking about this future a lot lately. After all, Arthur is an anxiety-prone, obsessive worrier, and lately there have been quite a few legitimate reasons to worry, so lately Arthur is a bit fussier and more snappish than usual. 

That’s probably why Eames, by turn, has been a bit more filled with deliberate aplomb and casual standoffishness than usual. The Arthur of a few hundred millennia ago would have been loathe to assume that he could get under Eames’ skin to that degree, but the Arthur of this century knows that Eames’ weird behavior is probably a reaction to his own. 

He’s just not really sure what to do about it. Arthur has never been good at using his words, not in any millennia. This is why he buries himself in spreadsheets and data that can speak for him, to him, and about him most of the time. 

Sometimes, however, the data is complete rubbish — to wit, the data he currently has on his relationship with Eames: 8 jobs, 4 vacations, 11 weekends, all over a 23-month period (not counting the years of incessant UST prior, and _really_ not counting the echelons of barely concealed looks and wary flirtation across the firmament). 

It all seems to point towards something larger, but Arthur hasn’t had time to get his head around what that something larger is. He’s busy with the inception job on the priest, in addition to his other-worldly job commitments, and he’s had this knowledge burning in the back of his mind, unaddressed for weeks, when Eames casually hands Arthur a copy of the keys to his London flat one day, out of the blue.

Arthur is simultaneously:  
A) stunned that Eames is making such a huge gesture out of nowhere;  
B) annoyed that it has taken Eames this long in their relationship to decide that Arthur is worth giving keys to;  
C) terrified that sharing keys is apparently a thing they are doing;  
D) mortified because he has no equivalent copy of keys to hand Eames to the Paris flat, and what is he even doing, is he a terrible boyfriend, is he even a boyfriend, what _is_ this?

Of course he isn’t a boyfriend. Is he?

He frowns and stares at the keys so long that Eames takes them back, shrugging, and loops them back onto his own keychain. “Oh, nevermind, then, mate,” he says. “Thought they might come in handy, but if that’s not your thing, no worries.”

And then he just... _walks away._

Like he hasn’t just gone from asking Arthur to share property with him to reducing him to a _mate_ without taking a breath.

All of that happens, and now it’s a week later, and they still haven’t talked about it, and it’s the Tuesday before Purim, and Arthur is barely listening to his own responses as he reassures his mom over the phone that, yes, he’s going to synagogue, and he’s barely listening because he’s thinking about what kind of person doesn’t take his boyfriend to synagogue or react when his boyfriend offers him a key to his flat, much less return the gesture or even let him know that he _is_ welcome to come to his temple or his flat if he likes, and god, no wonder Eames wasn’t sure whether Arthur would accept the keys, because Arthur _didn’t_ accept the keys, did he? And now a week has passed and Arthur’s probably failed some kind of huge crucial test of not-boyfriendness, and _god_ why is “boyfriend” the worst word ever, like a word that twee and awkward could ever encompass a fraction of what Eames and Arthur have been to each other, and how could Arthur ever get that across in a gesture like a key, even if it would actually serve a practical purpose, and for that matter what does it mean if they’re boyfriends, or whatever they are, if they’re rapidly approaching the end of all human existence and soon their time on earth will come to an end and they’ll never see each other again except as bright dots across the firmament, et cetera et cetera?

“Are you getting enough sleep?” his mom asks him suddenly. “You just seem a bit agitated.”

See, here’s the thing. Arthur is talking on the phone to his mom right now, but Arthur is also the angel of death, and Arthur is, at any given moment, acutely aware of the sextillions upon septillions of atoms and heartbeats that make up human existence. Arthur is hearing the concern in his mother’s voice, and Arthur, hyper-aware of the expiration dates of every living thing on earth, knows exactly how long he has to spend with her before she becomes another thing he has to escort into the afterlife. Arthur is stammering into the phone that he’s just a little distracted by work, and Arthur is also judging this moment from the perspective that comes with having lived through eons and eons of time, whole universes of time, all the time one could ever hope to need. Arthur’s boyfriend problems are voluminous and overwhelming and Arthur’s boyfriend problems are overwhelmingly miniscule. The rapidly approaching end of the world is the worst thing that has ever happened and also barely a blip in the cosmos. Arthur is within and without himself, a fragile worrywart who doesn’t know how to return a simple gesture of emotional commitment, and a larger-than-life supernatural demigod who can bend all of time and space at his whim.

Arthur is acutely aware that across all of time and space, human love has been extremely difficult to define and understand except through quantifiable gestures like the one Eames just made, and even then a gesture can mean many different things in different contexts. Eames’ offering Arthur the keys to his flat is one tiny gesture out of millions; it doesn’t have to mean anything if they don’t agree on what that meaning is. 

But Arthur is also acutely aware that he and Eames have been following each other, coming together and clashing and bonding and forming partnerships, for millennia. Across all of time and space, there aren’t many celestial relationships that have forged themselves into steely commitment out of nothing but mutual interest and deepening acquaintance over time. And, like, he’s read books like _Vintner’s Luck_ , he’s seen _Wings of Desire_ ; he knows what’s up.

Arthur knows there’s a word humans have for relationships like this. But if this is truly what he and Eames have become to each other, if that’s truly what Eames is acknowledging behind the gesture of a house key, then it introduces an entirely different problem: 

How can he and Eames be soulmates when they don’t have souls?

 

 

 

“What in heaven’s name are you doing? Or perhaps I should say, what in hell are you doing?”

This is how Eames had greeted Arthur the first time they officially met — only at that point, of course, they were going by Eremiel and Azrael: Eremiel, watcher over the Abyss, Azrael, angel of death and retribution. 

At that time, neither the Abyss nor Death had been invented yet; they were still new enough concepts that no one really understood what went into their respective jobs. Retribution, however, was an activity for which Arthur was already starting to develop a taste. 

Arthur was an Ophalim so he was used to being stared at; it had been a big deal when he’d Rebelled. Eames, on the other hand, was something of an upstart: he was an Ishim, on the lowest, most recently created rung of angels, and he was often too much like a man for the comfort of the older angels. Other angels stared at him because he was gorgeous and smirking and insouciant; he _looked_ like the embodiment of rebellion that Arthur, staid, upright, focused Arthur, eventually became. 

Arthur, like every other angel, thought him beautiful from the moment he set eyes on him, and like every other angel he had tried not to dwell on it. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself from darting looks at Eames during odd moments. He hadn’t been sure whether Eames had noticed. 

As Satan’s angels were exiting heaven after the rebellion had begun, however, he’d found Eames one last time in the gathered crowd, unable to help being drawn to him even then. To his surprise, he’d found Eames’ eyes already fixed on him. 

They’d stared at one another, Eames looking troubled and worrying his pouty lower lip, Arthur’s eyes already starting to fill with their new shade of scarlet. He’d felt it, then, that tug of recognition, of mutual _something_ , before they’d ever said a word to each other.

They were supposed to be fighting on opposite sides during what proved to be a rather listless skirmish between heaven and hell, one of several that took place before the borders had been sorted out. It was their first meeting, but not the first time they’d scoped one another out across the hierarchy of heaven. 

The day they’d met again had been... odd. He’d gone into battle prepared to inflict damage, as ordered, only to find angels on all sides mostly bewildered by the thought of actually raising swords against one another. The idea of conflict was still new to both Heaven and Hell, and Arthur privately admitted to being exhausted by it after only a few celestial moments. If this was what the rest of eternity was destined to feel like, there was no help for any of them.

Before he had registered that the fighting had turned into a lot of uncertain standing around, however, he’d killed an old friend, Hepzibah, another Ophalim like himself. It hadn’t been pretty. Angels bled light and white smoke and heavenly essence when they died; currently the remnants of the Ophalim were still smoldering in a shocked heap on the battlefield where Arthur had run him through. The other angels on either side had simply parted the field for him afterward and stared, eyes wide with horror.

He had needed a break.

He shouldn’t have been embarrassed that Eames had caught him out having a smoke away from the battle fray, especially since Eames had ducked behind the same pillar of wisdom that he had, presumably also to take a break. But Eames still had his halo and was dripping golden light and spilling holy aura everywhere every time he moved, while Arthur was currently covered head to toe in sulphur, his eyes still bright hot embers from where they’d been inflamed by the rage of Lucifer, or whatever they were calling it. 

Eames tilted his head and looked at him, the lit cigarette still in his hand.

“You just killed an angel,” he said. “ _Killed_ her. Snuffed her out of existence.”

Arthur sniffed. “Technically matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so somewhere she’ll turn up, in some form or other.”

“You don’t believe you were Created?” Eames asked him, crooking an eyebrow.

Arthur shrugged. “I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that god’s been a bit of an absentee lately. If he’s not taking responsibility for his creations, there’s not much point in acknowledging him as a creator, is there?”

Eames hummed. “I can’t imagine the world without god at the center of it,” he said. “Doesn’t it get lonely down below without him?”

“To be honest, I’ve hardly noticed much of a difference,” Arthur said. Eames looked troubled by that. 

“You forget,” Arthur said, taking pity on him. “There are plenty of other gods and goddesses out there besides our one. Just because he’s the one who’s been keeping us in clover doesn’t mean he’s got the only game in town.”

“No,” Eames agreed. “Just the only game for me, I suppose.”

“See if you still feel that way in a few millennia,” Arthur said.

It took a few millennia, and then several hundred trillion millennia longer, for Eames to finally confess to Arthur that he was right.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said one night, while he and Arthur were walking side by side along the bank of the Yangtze River. In another decade, the ground they were walking would be completely underwater, millions of people forced out of their homes and villages, countless flora and fauna obliterated, as a result of the coming dam and others to follow after it. The unspoken weight of that knowledge had lain heavy between them. “You may have been onto something. What you said about god not taking responsibility for any of us.”

Arthur didn’t halt in his tracks, but was a close thing. He still vividly remembered that moment from all those aeons before, and he was momentarily surprised that Eames remembered it, too, that he could just bring it up as though it had happened the day before. But this wasn’t just any angel, after all; it was _Eames_. Arthur was flooded with affection alongside a vague sense of guilt. He placed his hand on Eames’ arm and squeezed gently. Eames looked over at him in surprise, and then smiled at him and linked their arms together, and they continued on without a word. Later, Eames took Arthur’s hand in his, and they walked on like that, comfortable and close, trying not to think of the dark foreknowledge which crowded in at the edge of their awareness. 

That was the first time, but not nearly the last, that guilt and loyalty have warred with one another in Arthur’s conscience regarding Eames. Demons are responsible for leading humans astray from their respective gods (Satan really isn’t picky about sticking to Judeo-Christian recruitments), but Arthur isn’t sure about the parameters of leading an angel away from his holy calling. 

He’s not sure if he _wants_ to lead Eames of all people astray, after all this time, and even though he knows that he would never be able to persuade Eames into anything Eames wasn’t already thinking about on his own, he’s not really happy about the idea. 

Arthur is painfully aware that his reticence might be a sign that he and Eames have rubbed off on each other over the years. Like an old married couple. He doesn’t want Eames to have to fall, and it’s quite possible he’s been vaguely floating upwards for some time now without realizing it.

He knows where this is going; he’s going to have to actually _talk_ to Eames like a grownup. They’re going to have to have the ‘defining the relationship’ talk, only defining the relationship will mean, will mean asking Eames to stare down all of space and time with him, to look into the annals of heaven and hell and the vast expanse of the universe and decide where they fit, if they fit in it together, what they’re even doing, and oh, _god_.

Now, though, they’re alone in Arthur’s hotel room (because Arthur hasn’t invited himself back to Eames’ flat since accidentally rejecting the proffered key), and Eames has Arthur’s head tilted back with a hand lightly cupping Arthur’s throat and he’s rutting into him, thick and masculine and so, so utterly human that Arthur can’t breathe for a moment for wanting Eames and his roguish winks and the pet names and the way he breathes so deep when he’s against Arthur like this, like he wants to inhale everything that Arthur is, and Arthur can’t think about _not_ having this when the world goes dark at last, when everything ends and they are no longer human but cast once more back into their respective homes, with the endless expanse between heaven and hell between them.

He gasps, and Eames takes it as a sign that he’s close and says, “Darling, _yes_ , please, yes,” and Arthur squeezes his eyes shut and grips the headboard and tries to make it last as long as he can anyway. He is, after all, a demon, and he’s never been very good at obeying a heavenly command.

 

 

“Eames, I don’t know about your forgery,” Arthur says consideringly after the first time they do a trial run on what Arthur is privately calling the priestception. “It feels a little over the top.”

Eames looks away out the window of the coworking space they’re in — one advantage of Arthur and Eames running jobs in a post-Cobb career is that their working environments don’t make them feel like seedy thugs, but rather regular white-collar career criminals like all the other rich fuckers — and fails to repress a smile. “Is that so, Arthur?”

Arthur hums. “It feels a little kitschy to me. I know he’s a priest, but the halo might be too much. And the robes? Please.”

Eames swivels around in his chair and says, “I defer to your infinitely superior knowledge of all things holy,” and fixes Arthur with a look that is full of affection. It is a look that also contains the supreme smugness of intimate knowledge you only get after knowing someone for trillions of millennia. Arthur is stricken with the intensity of longing and fondness and desire he feels for Eames’ dumb smug face and his supernaturally velvet lips and his endlessly generous smiles and eyes and heart, the way he continues to, infuriatingly, _love people_ despite everything, despite his own wary cynicism and misgivings about the basic project of humanity. 

The idea that Eames, the same Eames who looks at humanity and sees reason for hope instead of despair, looks at Arthur and sees someone he wants to share keys with, fills Arthur with joy and panic and an overwhelmed feeling of helplessness. It is an intensity of feeling Arthur usually only gets when thinking about what assholes deities are to humans or what assholes humans are to each other. The only thing Arthur knows better than Eames at this point is the depth of human suffering and human grief, and the modicum of comfort he’s derived in the face of all that sadness is the quiet assurance of knowing that he will never have to escort Eames across the Veil; that Eames is eternal, Eames is safe.

And yet Arthur can’t stop thinking about asking him to — to —

“Ugh,” says Ariadne from across the room. “You guys are doing that thing again.”

“Thing?” Eames glances over at her. She waves a hand in annoyance.

“The in-jokey, conversations without saying a word thing.”

“Ah,” says Eames. “You’ll have to forgive us, Ariadne. Arthur and I have a bit of a history. You might say we go back.”

“I need to talk to you,” Arthur hears himself blurt. 

They both look at him.

“Let’s take the afternoon,” he says, knowing Eames doesn’t miss the way he swallows.

 

 

Arthur commandeers Eames and gets an Uber back to Eames’ flat. “Look, Arthur,” Eames says when he registers the address, “you don’t have to make any kind of gesture if you’re not —”

“Shut up,” Arthur interrupts him, but his voice is gentle, so Eames lifts his eyebrows in acknowledgement and does just that, kicking back in silence until they arrive back at his apartment.

Eames’ flat is on the second floor of a trendy section of Heathrow, and it’s full of vintage knicknacks and an endearing combination of overpriced modern art and quirky garage sale paintings no one else would possibly want but that Eames inevitably finds charming. Arthur parks himself in a sturdy-backed wooden chair in a corner, beneath a murky landscape of swans nesting on the Thames done by a grandmother who couldn’t decide whether she was going for Impressionist or Pre-Raphaelite. When she’d passed, she’d asked Arthur, “do you think my paintings will ever be thought of as any good?” and Arthur had replied, “I know someone who’s falling in love with one of them very shortly.”

He takes a deep breath and reminds himself for the umpteenth time that he knows Eames. He knows that no matter what Eames says in response to him, that won’t change. They’ll know each other when the world ends. Arthur believes in very little at this point, but he knows this with utter, deep certainty.

“I know that I haven’t been very forthcoming lately,” he starts. “It’s because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. About us.” 

Eames has been putting on the kettle for tea. He doesn’t do a doubletake, but he does put far too much tea into the infuser. Arthur watches him as he grimaces and spoons some out again.

“I — I think, I think you know that I love you,” Arthur says. Eames puts down the teaspoon and looks up at him.

“Of course I do,” Eames replies, his voice gone a bit soft around the edges. “That is, I— I know you and I have each other’s backs, out there. I had — I’d hoped that meant something down here, in the here and now.”

“It does,” Arthur says. “It means everything.” He’s doing that thing where he clenches and unclenches his fist in the fabric of his pants, and Eames looks as though he very much wants to do something comforting like bring Arthur a mug of tea, but he can’t because it’s not done infusing, so instead he just clenches his own fist around the countertop of the kitchen island, which shouldn’t be the absurdly comforting gesture that it is. “But I don’t just want to be — I _love_ you,” Arthur says, gaining confidence. “I mean that I — I want us to be together in the firmament.”

Eames gasps. “Arthur,” he says, and his jaw falls open and he gapes at Arthur so long without moving that Arthur gets up and goes to pour the tea.

“I know that it’s not really possible,” he says. “Not while we’re both on opposite sides.”

“I would never ask you to switch sides,” Eames says, shifting into autopilot and reaching for the milk and sugar. “Arthur, honestly, I would never.”

Arthur lets him fuss with the mugs. “I know,” he says, stilling Eames’ feverish tea-stirring with a hand on his. “I’d never dream of asking you to Fall. You know I wouldn’t.”

“Bloody heaven and hell,” Eames mutters. “What does any of it even mean anyway? It’s not as if there’s a discernible difference between them at this point.”

“Careful,” Arthur murmurs. “That’s seditious talk.” 

Eames snorts. He looks up at Arthur. “I really didn’t mean to freak you out by offering you my keys the other day,” he says. “I just thought it might be time for — that you might welcome the commitment.”

“I needed to be pushed into thinking about this seriously,” Arthur says. “You know what’s coming.”

Eames sighs. “I wasn’t thinking about the end of the world when I asked you to share the flat, darling.”

“No, I know, but —” Arthur frowns and sips his tea. “It’s happening. It’s coming whether we’re ready for it or not, and I’m not ready to spend the rest of eternity without you. It’s bad enough only seeing you here and there when we’re in the firmament trading souls.”

“It is a bit like you’re the postal delivery dropping off parcels,” Eames agrees. 

“Without switching sides, as far as I can tell,” Arthur says, “we only have one other option.”

“Become human,” Eames says, blanching.

“Have you ever thought about it?”

“Being human?” Eames grins at him, then pulls him in for a slow kiss. “Arthur, with you, like this, I feel like I’m practically human already.”

“But we won’t — we’ll be _mortal_ ,” and Arthur can’t keep the grimace out of his voice at _the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to_.

Eames frowns. “I don’t relish the prospect of dying,” he says. “But — but everyone else does it, so I suppose it can’t be all bad.” He looks at Arthur. “And I suppose you would know.”

Arthur doesn’t know what to say to that. Humans all handle dying so differently. He’s not exactly sure what he’s leading them to when he hands their souls over to Eames. But he trusts Eames with their care, which is the greatest gift he can give to each of them.

As Eames looks at him, the light of inspiration suddenly flickers in his gaze. “Arthur,” he says abruptly. “You’re the Angel of Death.” Arthur shrugs. “Technically, aren’t you sort of a free agent? Heaven and hell each need you to deliver souls. It’s why heaven let you keep your title even after you Fell.”

Arthur stares at him. “You think I can, what, buy out my way out of my contract with hell?”

Eames has that look he gets during job plannings before he’s about to suggest something incredibly stupid and brilliant. “You can promise hell a guaranteed number of souls in exchange for letting you go into business for yourself.”

“But it’s your job to sort souls,” Arthur points out.

“Exactly,” Eames says. “Which is convenient, because of course you’ll need an assistant anyway.”

“And that’s... you.”

“Of course it’s me,” Eames says happily. “You can offer to buy out my contract with heaven in exchange for a guaranteed number of souls!”

“But won’t god and Satan be pissed if we guarantee each of them a pre-determined number of sinners and saints? Won’t they cancel each other out?”

“What they won’t know won’t hurt them,” Eames says.

Arthur considers. “What if... what if they say no?” he says. 

Eames tilts his head. “Then we take the plunge,” he says. “We become humans and live out our lives. Grow old together.”

Arthur thinks about growing old with Eames. He thinks it’s a prospect he could get used to, but for the dread of death. 

It’s an odd sensation, abruptly being frightened of himself.

“Arthur,” Eames says. “You’re the Angel of Death. You’re not replaceable. Faced with the choice of finding someone else to take the job, _and_ having to find a new Ferrier into the bargain, I’m pretty sure heaven and hell would let you do whatever you liked.”

“Wouldn’t that give me a terrifying amount of power?” Arthur asks him, feeling a bit dubious.

“Darling,” Eames says fondly, “the only one who doesn’t realize you’ve always had a terrifying amount of power is you.”

 

 

It turns out that heaven and hell are surprisingly enthused by the prospect of having Death and the Ferrier be neutral parties. Apparently both Satan and god have suspected Arthur and Eames of being far too sympathetic to the other side for some time now, and they’re only too happy to have their fears allayed in the form of a declaration of complete neutrality. This way, minus the guaranteed allotments of souls on either side, they can each rest assured that all souls are being sorted fairly and squarely between eternal rapture, damnation, or limbo.

And Arthur and Eames get what the humans call a Hollywood ending.

“You know,” Eames says, casually stroking Arthur’s tail. “Now that we’re free agents there’s nothing _technically_ stopping us from freeing everyone from Purgatory and letting them into heaven.”

“I have a feeling heaven would notice,” Arthur mumbles, comfy in the warm shell of Eames’ fluttering wings, perfectly content to have his tail stroked like this forever.

“Yeah, but why would heaven quibble with more souls?” Eames says, yawning. “Hard to kick people out once they’ve settled in.”

“Heaven is so _boring_ , though,” Arthur mutters.

“Honestly, we should just make our own world,” Eames says. “Like building a world in dreamshare, but cooler. And full of real souls, not projections.” 

Arthur cracks one eye open. Then the other. “Could we do that?” he asks slowly.

Eames considers. “Like you’re always saying, there are lots of gods and demigods out there. Ours isn’t the only game in town.”

Arthur sits up, mind racing. “We could do it,” he says. “A space to hold billions and billions of souls.”

Eames watches him. “But where would you put them all?”

Arthur shrugs. Since leaving Satan’s employ, his eyes no longer glow red; still, he can feel them now, growing dark with inspiration. “It’s a big universe,” he says. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

Eames grins at him, the cheshire cat smile Arthur always knew he was destined to fall in love with. “Well,” he says. “Better get to work. We’ve got a lot to do before the end of the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> You guys, I didn't even invent Eremiel and Azrael; they are "real" angels from Hebrew mythology and those are their actual job descriptions, because Arthur and Eames are just that soulmate-y. :D

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [As Heads is Tails: How an Angel and a Demon fell in love and the trail of paperwork they left behind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10701915) by [QueenThayet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenThayet/pseuds/QueenThayet)




End file.
